Thursday, March 27, 2014

Here in the Psycho-gourmet test kitchen we’re not great rule-followers,
which is to say we’re especially bad when it comes to following a recipe. But having discovered a book titled The Grand Performer, by which they mean
Knox Unflavored Gelatine, I decided I’d try to obey the instructions and make a
New England Clam Chowder Pie – “slightly unconventional” indeed.

The book has no date on it, but it seems to be from the 1980s. The Knox Gelatine Company was founded in 1889
and the introduction says, “For almost 100 years creative cooks have relied on
Knox.”

I gathered the ingredients (above) though in the end I didn’t use the bottled clam juice since there was plenty
in the cans of clams, and I topped it up with a little sherry instead: otherwise I did
what the recipe told me to do. It also seemed
to me, just from reading the quantities, that 6 tablespoons of melted butter
wasn’t enough to combine with one and a half cups of soda crackers to create a
crust, but again I followed orders. And
it looked like this when it was done:

And it looked like this when it was sliced:

You see I was right about the crust.
And how did it taste? Well, a bit
bland, frankly. Did it need some lemon
juice? Yes it did: I thought it would. It also needed some salt. Both these things were easily added, but it
still tasted a bit bland. And it
occurred to me that if you took a can of clam chowder soup and threw in some gelatine
you’d get a very similar result, though I don’t think that would actually
constitute a recipe.

The Grand Performer is reasonably well illustrated: by the 1980s the era of truly
garish food photography was in decline.
It contains no picture of New England Clam Chowder Pie, but there
is this bad boy:

Melon Magnifique. Honest, that’s
what they call it. It’s a scooped
out cantaloupe filled with sliced grapes and strawberries set in jellied yoghurt. Goes especially well with ballet
shoes, evidently.

Monday, March 24, 2014

Tom Lutz, he of the Los Angeles Review of Books, is in Asuncion; at least if his Facebook page is to be believed. My schoolboy geography and a quick Google suggests that this is the capital of Paraguay. The man does lead an enviable and charmed life: something I never doubted for a moment.

Anyway, he posts this image on his page - the Simpson Burguer.

I have always been prepared to eat Simpsons endorsed food products, in order to make Matt Groening and Rupert Murdoch a little richer, but have never been a fan of the Butterfinger,

and the "Menu Homer" below seems to be a French-only variation.

I guess I'll just have to wait for the Simpsons cassoulet. Hey, it's "pur porc."Homer would approve of that, right?

Gimlets have been discussed elsewhere in this blog. I like a good gimlet, largely because Marlowe
and Terry Lennox drink them in Chandler’s The
Long Goodbye, in a place called Victor’s bar.

We sat in the corner bar at Victor’s and drank gimlets. “They don’t
know how to make them here,” he (Terry Lennox) said. “What they call a gimlet
is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A
real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats
martinis hollow.”

Of course, since Chandler puts the words into the mouth of
one his more ambiguous characters, who knows what his actual opinion was? It sounds like way too much Rose’s lime
juice. Five or six to one seems about
right to me. Vodka instead of gin is
just fine too.

In any case, the gimlet, in one way, seems just about the
least sophisticated cocktail you could imagine: just two ingredients, one of
them a sticky syrup. And yet something,
perhaps something alchemical, happens when you put the two things together and
create a drink that’s way more than the sum of the parts.

Last week I had a long-standing dinner date with some
friends, and I’d booked a table a Morrison, a vaguely Scottish restaurant a few
miles up the road in Atwater village.
What I hadn’t realized was that this was St. Patrick’s Day, and the
Hibernian blood was running high. I
never thought about it when I made the reservation.

In fact the place wasn’t quite as much of a zoo as it might
have been, and as the above ad shows, they’d been at it for 4 days by the time we got
there so maybe they were running out of juice.

I ordered a specialty cocktail, a Morrison gimlet, which
started as your standard vodka and lime juice but then they added liquidized cucumber. It was way better than it had any right
to. It was of course very bright
green. And I did ask the server whether
it was always that green, or whether this was some sort of St Patrick’s Day. No, he said it’s always that color. I was glad about that. Here it is on their website.

And now I have made my own.
Liquidizing a cucumber is actually a fair amount of messy fun, and the
resulting cocktail looked like this:

My version was considerably more cucumbery than the Morrison
version, hence the color, and the taste.
Well, as they almost certainly don’t say in the land of St, Patrick: the
other man’s gimlet is always greener.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Did anybody not love Clarissa Dickson Wright, one of the two big-boned ladies, whose death has just been reported?Her battles with alcohol are pretty well documented, not least by herself, and are sad in their way, but I'm still deeply amused by the story of how she and her pals once got so drunk on Christmas Day morning that they forgot to put the turkey in the oven.Clarissa then had a brilliant idea. Why not set the oven to self-cleaning mode, which gets up to about 500 degrees C, 900 degrees F? That would surely get the bird cooked quickly.I wonder if it did. Clarissa and her friends never found out. They were so drunk that they again forgot all about the turkey.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

“Ask not what you can do for
your country. Ask what’s for lunch.” This is supposedly a quotation from
Orson Welles. It sounds apocryphal, but
maybe it’s for real. I hope so.

I suppose, in the end, nobody would really
want to model themselves on Orson Welles.
Yes, he made Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, The Third Man, and he married Rita Hayworth, that sounds like more
than enough for one lifetime. But he
had so many thwarted projects, so much frustration and rage, manifested not
least in his obesity, that most of us wouldn’t want actually to live his life, I think.

But in one small way I did used to emulate
Orson Welles. I read that whenever he
called up a restaurant to make a reservation he booked a table for one more
person than was actually coming. I thought that was a great idea, and did it myself when I lived in London and New York.
If there were two of us having dinner I’d book a table for three, if three were coming I’d book a table for
four, and so on. I didn’t need as much
extra room as Welles did, but tables in London and New York restaurants are so
damn small you need every bit of extra room you can get. I’d arrive at the restaurant and say one of
the party wasn’t coming, but they’d still put us at a bigger table. It didn’t work every single time, but
surprisingly often it did.

I recently found the above image of Welles
and Peter Bogdanovich in a supermarket.
I don’t know the story behind the picture, but it does relate to one of Bogdanovich’s great, and possibly tragic, anecdotes about
Welles. Bogdanovich was acting in Welles' unfinished movie The Other Side of the Wind (1972), and
came upon Welles, alone, in hiding in some far corner of the set, eating a
giant size bag of corn chips. Welles explained, "You don't gain weight
if nobody sees you eating.”

Welles regularly complained that when he
was trying to get money for a film project, could call up any producer and
they’d happily do lunch. Everyone wanted
to be able say they’d had lunch with the great Orson Welles, but nobody ever
wanted to give him money to make a film.

Here’s a very short extract from Henry
Jaglom’s book My Lunches with Orson, transcripts
of their meals together in LA in the 1980s.
Here they are at

Ma Maison.

The waiter arrives.

Waiter: Would you wish the salad with grapefruit and orange?

O.W.: That’s a terrible idea. It’s awful—typically German.

H.J.: They ruined the chicken salad when they started using that
mustard. It’s a whole different chicken salad.

O.W.: They have a new chef.

Waiter: Roast pork?

O.W.: Oh my God. On a hot day, roast pork? I can’t eat pork. But I’ll
order it, just to smell pork.

Monday, March 10, 2014

Just a couple of invitations I’ve had in the last week or so, and since
they’re both in London I’m obviously not going to be going to them, but it does
give you some idea of just what a cool and connected guy I am. (That's irony, right?)

First:
the above from the Rocket Gallery, "MARTIN PARR :
SAY CHEESE : POP-UP RESTAURANT - a Martin Parr dinner based on his
classic food photographs.” Well I love Martin Parr’s work a great deal,
but most of the food in his photographs looks kind of revolting, deliberately
so.Still, there’s an entry on his blog
about eating at El Bulli, so he’s obviously not a strictly meat and potatoes
guy.

The place did give him some ambivalent
feelings however. He writes, “By now it is 12.15am and we are ready to depart. Our
banquet was four and a half hours long, and the service was never slow, the
dishes just kept coming. The strange thing is that although we have had some of
the most remarkable food we have ever tasted, the whole experience lacked the
satisfaction of thinking what a great meal. The food lacked balance, not enough
great things with vegetables and too overwhelmingly rich. However we would not
have missed this for the world, as the meal felt like an unforgettable night at
the theatre.” Ferran Adrià obviously decided
the show, or at least that particular show, didn’t have to go on.

Above is a photograph from a previous Martin
Parr themed pop-up. I am deeply
intrigued by the girl at the front on the right. Did she keep that mask on throughout the
event? That must have made eating really
tricky for her.

Also in other news, Bompas and Parr (no
relation) are doing a Journey to the Centre of the Gut. To quote the press release.: “Working with
the one of the UK’s leading gastroentologist Dr Simon Anderson, Bompas &
Parr present a fantastic voyage to the centre of Gizzi Erskine's gut.” This is Gizzi Erskine.

“Following a short introduction on the medical
practice of endoscopy and gastroenterology the food writer, pop-up chef and
Sunday Times columnist will swallow a SynMed pill-cam. This will stream footage
from within as the camera moves along the alimentary canal.

“The journey beyond the
stomach will be scored by Dom James and his Alvine Argonauts who will play
freeform jazz with peristaltic bass.

“The resulting footage
will be used to illustrate a volume of Memoirs of a Stomach – an obscure 1853
diet book told from the perspective of a stomach. The art book combining scans
of the volume with contemporary gastroentological photography will be printed
as a limited edition run, distributed through selected bookshops in October.”

I really would like to be
there for that one. Oh, to be a
jetsetter, like Parr, Parr and Bompas.”